Walter Benjamin Quotes

So at a time in which the media give the public everything it wants and desires, maybe art should adopt a much more aggressive attitude towards the public. I myself am very much inclined to take this position.

I emerged in that incredible moment in the 1980s when all kinds of social questions about subjectivity and objectivity, about who was making, who was looking.

I do think that part of literature's job is to comment on and participate in the social issues of the time.

Art has to be reflective of our society.

From the very early stage when I started doing performance art in the '70s, the general attitude - not just me, but also my colleagues - was that there should not be any documentation, that the performance itself is artwork and there should be no documentation.

I would say that no film is apolitical. There are politics in all films. Any film that is anchored in a society, any film that deals with humanity is necessarily political.

So begins a question which has of late become more and more urgent: what is the relation of aesthetics to politics?

Listen: our culture is saturated with irony whether we know it or not.

Listen, whatever makes the movie better. That's the attitude you have to have.

At first, I found the music I was making really hard to find a home for. I felt like my attitude was really British, but not the actual sounds I was making. Back in 2003, when I made 'Galang,' there were no clubs that had an 'anything and everything' attitude.

The idea of modernity is beginning to lose its vitality. It is losing it because modernity is no longer a critical attitude but an accepted, codified convention.

Jazz in itself is not struggling. That is, the music itself is not struggling... It's the attitude that's in trouble. My plays insist that we should not forget or toss away our history.

There is a difference in what people are willing to consider, daytime versus nighttime.

There is no such thing as pure art. It's a bourgeois conceit.

Hip Hop is an idea. It is the pursuit of one's authentic being through the arts. It is not a physical thing; it is an attitude - even an aptitude.

Growing up in a specific area has a certain sociological and economic reason, so I'm interested in using myself as a case study to look as those things.

[Internet] is kind of like a hammer. The technology itself doesn't determine how its used. It depends on the social, cultural and economic context in which the technology is made available.

I'm not a preacher, but I preach. I'm not a Buddhist, but I chant. I'm not race theorist, but I have questions and ponderances around the complexities of race and class and culture wherever I am.

I read something in the paper that really confused me the other day. It said that 80 percent of the people in New York are minorities. Shouldn't you not call them minorities when they get to be 80 percent of the population? That's a very white attitude, don't you think? I mean, you could take a white guy to Africa and he'd be like 'Look at all the minorities around here! I'm the only majority.'

The weekly cartoons, as were my plays, came from a sense of criticism, criticism of the times, critical of the culture, of our manners and attitudes towards each other. The children's books come from the reverse. They're more supportive, since we're living in a time where we talk more about kids and do less, we talk about balancing the budget and we do it by cutting education.

All plays are social comment to one extent or another.

Art is something that nobody laughs at and nobody makes any money out of is the attitude, which I would dispute.

[Shanghai Biennale] has been my attitude for as long as I've been practicing art and other cultural-related activities.

The western is a universal frame within which it's possible to comment on today.

A child's attitude toward everything is an artist's attitude.